Java standards for web services are constantly being developed. Concurrently, businesses are building important applications on top of web services infrastructures, such as that available in WebLogic Server from BEA Systems of San Jose, Calif. As these applications evolve, the web service infrastructures require management capabilities to operate more efficiently and to provide authors of applications with a means for managing and monitoring infrastructure resources and services.
Past management systems have been difficult to use and expose underlying architecture to clients, thereby making application integration more difficult and time consuming. Past management systems have also been designed as proprietary systems that distribute management objects across systems. These proprietary systems have been disadvantageous because they do not track the changes made to MBeans throughout a network.
The applications currently developed do not provide a customized management capability for a server network. What is needed is an application management model that provides customized management capability for a broad range of distributed applications.